Vector round-trip bridge for Photoshop workflows

The moment comes when a designer finishes a composition in Photoshop — masks, layers, everything placed — and realizes they need one element as a clean, editable SVG for a developer or print shop. They try the native SVG export, which users describe as broken or missing entirely in older versions, then give up and open Illustrator to manually recreate the shape from scratch. That means duplicated work, version drift, and a handoff that takes an hour instead of two minutes.

The gap persists because Adobe has every incentive to keep Illustrator as the canonical vector tool. Fixing vector round-tripping inside Photoshop would cannibalize Illustrator licenses, which is a separate product with its own revenue. The buyer of Creative Cloud often isn't the designer who lives with this friction daily — it's a company paying a blanket license — so the complaint never reaches anyone with budget authority. Adobe hears the frustration, ships a half-broken SVG export, and moves on.

What designers actually need is something that sits between the two files: you bring your Photoshop PSD in, it identifies shapes, paths, and smart objects that can be represented as clean vectors, and it exports them as properly structured SVG or AI files with named layers intact. The complaints are consistent: 'transferring work from Illustrator without losing quality', 'vector assets don't export easily to Illustrator like they do the other way around', 'paths don't survive the round-trip'. The work isn't about replacing either app — it's about the translation step that both apps handle badly.

This is a business and not a feature because the problem recurs every single project for any designer who works across both print and digital. Studios producing brand assets — logo lockups, icon sets, marketing collateral — deal with this weekly. The alternative is a manual hour of path-tracing in Illustrator, or a subscription to an app that only solves half of it. The recurrence, and the concrete time cost per project, makes it something a studio would pay a flat monthly fee to eliminate.

What to build

Build a desktop app that ingests a Photoshop PSD, detects all shape layers and paths, and exports them as clean, layer-named SVG or AI files with path integrity preserved — installable as a Photoshop plugin panel and as a standalone drag-and-drop converter.

Where to start

Start with the single case of exporting named shape layers and pen-tool paths from PSD to SVG with no rasterization — ignore layer effects and mixed content entirely — and market it specifically to icon designers who work in Photoshop but deliver SVG sprite sheets to developers.

The hard part

Path detection in real PSDs is messy — users combine clipping masks, layer effects, and raster layers on the same object, so automated vectorization will produce garbage output for a significant percentage of real files, which means the first users will hit a broken experience before the edge cases are handled.

How it makes money

Flat monthly subscription per seat, around $9–15/month, with a free tier limited to 5 exports per month to drive word-of-mouth inside studios.